The Public/Private Dichotomy and Attitudes Toward Female Politicians

• In Event: The Gendered State and Women's Equality

Abstract

Since the 1990s, women’s representation has increased globally, even in places where gender equality in other dimensions lags behind. In some countries, these increases have led to the embrace of female politicians, and a larger role for women in public life. In others, attitudes remain unchanged, or there are backlash effects. What explains this acceptance or rejection of female authority?

I argue that when the state enacts policies that facilitate women’s full and equal participation in the public sphere, this communicates a message that women have equal rights to political office. These messages are at the root of the acceptance or rejection of female authority. Women’s entry into politics is a highly visible disruption of socio-historical constructions of gender, particularly the association of women with private sphere of the home and men with public life. When state policies cast women as equal citizens, this teaches people that “the political meaning of a female sex classification signifies not only a location in the home as wives and mothers and in the service sector of the market as social workers but also in the state itself as members of its legislature” (McDonagh 2010). In this analysis, I find that variation in policies which set the boundaries of the public/private dichotomy condition responses to female politicians, explaining the disparate reactions between places. If women enter political office at a time when women’s full participation in other sectors of the public sphere is limited, this disjuncture can lead to backlash effects, at least until “the political meaning” of women shifts.

The public/private dichotomy is at the root of the feminist struggle. Although the particulars of the oppression that women face differ across contexts, as Pateman (1983) declared: “[t]he dichotomy between the private and the public is central to almost two centuries of feminist writing and political struggle; it is, ultimately, what the feminist movement is about.” The dichotomy has consequences ranging from the devaluation of “women’s work” to the suppression of women’s political voices to the “legitimization of discriminatory practices against [women] in their homes and in the marketplace—the latter an arena closely aligned with the anti-state perspective of the private sphere” (Cohen and O’Byrne 2013). Thus far, theorizing about the effects of the public/private dichotomy has remained largely within the purview of women and gender studies scholars, sociologists, legal scholars, and activists. Few studies of women’s representation within political science—particularly quantitative political science—make a serious attempt to integrate the public/private dichotomy into their analyses, neither to explore the changing conditions that open up opportunities to women’s political participation nor the changes in values that occur as these boundaries shift. The exclusion of this important issue from previous analyses not only obfuscates context but fails to capture what many feminist scholars argue is the primary source of women’s oppression. The lack of consideration for the importance of the public/private dichotomy in studies of women’s representation neglects women’s experiences of oppression in the private sphere, which shape their opportunities for full and equal participation in public life.

To measure the public/private dichotomy, I identify laws, statutes, and policies which capture the extent to which the state grants opportunities to women to participate in public life or relegates them to the private sphere of the home. Specifically, I examine policies which provide protections for women in the workplace through an analysis of maternity leave policies, laws which create protections for women in the home such as those surrounding domestic violence, and laws related to “bodied citizenship” and the right to choose motherhood through liberalized abortion policies. Not only are these policies closely related to opportunities for women’s public sphere participation, but they extend citizenship beyond its narrow definition. I then match this data to attitudinal surveys covering 115 countries over a twenty-year period to examine the relationship between national-level policies and individual-level attitudes. I find that backlash towards increases in the descriptive representation of women is indeed closely related to the policies that structure the public/private dichotomy at the time of women’s entry into political office. In addition to explaining why increases in descriptive representation have disparate effects, this paper is a methodological contribution through its integration of feminist theories about the public/private dichotomy into a quantitative framework in order to capture larger cultural constructions of gender.

Author

• Danielle M. Higgins, American University